Category: Dervish box lid

Last week I was in Germany, at the Sufi summer school that I go to each year. On the Wednesday afternoon, there’s always a market, where participants offer for sale things that they’ve made, and I took some of the embroidered boxes that I’ve been featuring on this blog.

I was really pleased to sell about three-quarters of the boxes that I took, and all three of the miniature framed pictures. People often sell jewellery, or ethnic-style clothes suitable for dancing, but no-one else was selling anything embroidered.

They have all gone to good homes – some of them, to the homes of senior Sufi teachers, as several people who bought a box told me that it would be a gift for their teacher.

The Dervish design box is one of these – it will be given to a woman in America who is well known for her beautifully graceful dervish dancing (‘turning’).

One of my firends, who is half Scottish and half Australian, bought the box with ‘Allaho Akbar’ in Arabic calligraphy on it – the first box in this series that I ever made.

And one couple bought a Sufi heart and wings box to put their wedding rings in when they get married next month, which I think is really sweet.

So, I only have a few left, now, and they will probably be given as either birthday presents or initiation presents to people that I know. Well worth the time it took to make them all, I think 🙂

During the past year, whenever I’ve had some spare time (ha! what’s that??!), I’ve been making these little embroidered boxes. Most of them have the same motif on the top – the ‘heart and wings’ emblem of the Sufi Ruhaniat International, which is the spiritual path that I follow. The boxes are just the right size to store prayer beads in. I am going to a Sufi summer school next week, where I hope to spend a lot of time doing Dances of Universal Peace, and these boxes, hopefully, will be sold at the market that is held on the Wednesday afternoon, when the participants, who come mainly from Germany (as that’s where the summer school takes place), share items that they’ve made.

The boxes are covered in satin. I’ve used various fabrics for the lids, depending what I had available in my stash – mostly Dupion silk – and the feathers of the wings are in either DMC silver thread, or Ophir gold thread. Each feather is a lazy daisy stitch, with the outer row having a straight stitch down the centre as well. The little hearts in the centre of the motif are padded with a felt patch first, just a bit smaller than the top shape, which is fine metallic kid leather (bought from the Golden Hinde website).

The tricky bit with each box was getting the design on the fabric in the first place, as any drawn outlines would show (especially on the design with wings) – so I thread traced the design through tissue paper, ripping the paper off to leave the design, and then unpicking the thread as I stitched the design.

Some of the boxes are of Arabic calligraphy, using Stef Francis variegated silks. These were lovely to do, but very time-consuming, so I didn’t get as many of these finished as I’d have liked.

The three framed pictures are done in one strand of Anchor on 32 count evenweave, showing the Sufi phrase ‘Toward the One’ (one of them says the phrase in German, for the benefit of the Germans at the summer school!).

I don’t often make completed stitching to sell – usually, I sell kits for miniature needlepoint, so it will be interesting to see how these go down with people.

Here’s another one of the satin-covered boxes, that I have been embroidering for a few months now. I’m getting a collection of these together, so that I can take them to a Sufi summer school in Germany in July, and hopefully sell some at the market that is held mid-week during the school. With a bit of luck, I might be able to make enough from what I sell, to cover the costs of what I buy (it’s a very good market – lots of jewellery, clothes, prayer beads, books, etc. – very tempting stuff!).

The design was stitched with one or two strands of Anchor cotton, shade 403 Black for most of it, with the hat done in 46 Red. I only used stem stitch, with a bit of straight stitch to define the fingers and facial details. The fabric was a piece of yellow polycotton, underlined with white (although, on a piece like this with quite light stitch coverage, I don’t think the underlining was actually necessary).

The box measures 3 1/2 inches by 2 1/4 inches, so it’s just large enough to keep prayer beads in, or a favourite piece of jewellery.

For such a small, minimalist piece of stitching (not my usual style at all), I was very pleased with the effect of movement that I achieved with this.